Sexuality: perhaps the last frontier in the neuroscientific field of Things Deep In Our Hearts That Confuse And Scare Us That We Have To Confront Someday But Not Just Yet. “Sexuality is not simply an attribute one has or a disposition or a patterned set of inclinations. It is a mode of being disposed toward others, including in the mode of fantasy, and sometimes only in the mode of fantasy.” So says Judith Butler in Undoing Gender, arguing that sexuality and even gender itself are big, fat lies, performances not grounded in anatomical reality—and not just in Bangkok, right here in God’s America. To which I say, where do you draw the line between performed and real, Judith Butler? Date My Mom? Ohio State v. Michigan? Rock Band??

These are questions we in Music Video Studies now must grapple with, like it or not, thanks to Katy Perry. With the June release of “I Kissed a Girl” to the YouTubed masses, Ms. Perry seemingly flaunts her “disposition” in a gold lamé muffin-wrapper dress. In the video, as you see, she’s able to “try on” her newfound mode of being in an environment safe from men, dark colors, and normative sexual constructs. “It’s just human nature,” she coos, unconvincingly. Sounding like an ebullient, beautiful songbird trapped inside a talkbox, Perry prances across two whole sets with a cadre of carefully-selected-to-include-all-the-races women. The camera cuts, at intervals, to close-ups of breasts, bare legs, and the like, helpfully reminding the viewer that there are appealing aspects of women. At 2:08, a pillow fight develops. Pretty anodyne lipstick (or indeed, cherry chapstick) lesbian fare, but that’s all right—we eagerly anticipate the song title’s all-but-promised money shot…er, resolution of the discourse of sexual subject reification.

Spoiler alert: I am about to disclose the details of the titular girl-kissing. 2:49, alllllll right, here we go. 2:52, she’s in bed, should be any second now… 2:58, she’s…wait, is that…is that a man in bed with her? 3:05, it’s over. Tee-hee, it was all a dream! No girls were kissed in the filming of this music video! Are you serious? Are you truly serious, Katy Perry? Not a split-second of mouth-to-mouth? Like you, dear reader, I approached this video with just one modest but resolute expectation: the kissing of a girl (and at least a simulation of liking it would have been an added bonus, certainly). This foulest of deceptions is like buying an ice cream cake, but when you cut it open, it’s filled with bees instead. Or, maybe not bees, but it’s filled with regular old cake filling, which in some ways is almost worse, since no one’s going to care about your stupid mislabeled-ice-cream-cake story unless there are bees involved. “I Kissed a Girl” is a video that delivers neither bees nor delicious ice cream filling.

Back in the warm and comforting bosom of heteronormativity, Ms. Perry, we find in the end, was simply in the mode of fantasy, as J-But herself might have predicted.

But this isn’t the first time Perry has interrogated our performances of sexuality. Another winner of a Katy Perry original “Ur [sic] So Gay,” set against a backdrop of blue sky and Super Mario World smiley-face clouds, gives mellifluous voice to thousands of mute Facebook wall posts; indeed, the more cumbersome working title was “OMG Ur So Gay.”

The casting choice in this stop-action gem is an apt one. The gay in question is a soy-loving Ken doll who drives a hybrid (why? Try a word association: hybrid > electric transportation > trolleys > San Francisco > Treaty of San Francisco officially ending World War II > gay). He primps, he pouts, he posts pensive self-portraits on his MySpace. He gives cupped-hand high-fives to dudes, which is the gay terrorist fist jab. Meanwhile his would-be Barbie cuts and dyes her hair, to no avail, for in the dramatic final scene, all is revealed, Ken-wise: below the belt, there is a void. Barbie is thrown for a loop of course, but just beyond the scene sits Judith Butler, looking all smug.

Where “I Kissed a Girl” is frustratingly murky on the subject of how gay one should or should not be (”felt so wrong,” but then consider: “felt so right”) and the extent to which one should like that, “Ur So Gay” is refreshingly unequivocal. Girls, forget these dickless, shiraz-guzzling, environment-caring-about homos, Ms. Perry advises. A real man greets his girl with a heart full of Pepe Lopez and a head full of I’ll stay out however the fuck late I want and you know there should be a bowl of cookie dough waiting for me when I get home, woman.